Top 110 Martin Freeman Quotes

The best of American television is thought-provoking, original, brilliant, exciting – from ‘The Sopranos‘ on, whether it’s ‘The Wire‘ or ‘Breaking Bad‘ or ‘House of Cards,’ they’re fantastic pieces of art.

I like anything with my face on it, just from an aesthetic point of view.

Although there’s an inherent light-heartedness to ‘Sherlock,’ I slightly err towards not doing the comedy.

Most people have a passive relationship with music and clothes, with culture. But music was my first contact with anything creative. Music is it, as far as I’m concerned.

Not all art is great; most of it’s rubbish.

If it were purely up to me, my kids would probably be vegetarian Catholic Marxists.

I like being called ‘Mr. Freeman’ occasionally.

You don’t want your children to look at you like you are anything special other than their dad.

I think the hardest part about anything you do for 18 months is just keeping yourself together for 18 months.

I’ve got a stag weekend coming up and I’ve said I’m not doing anything more than a few drinks. I won‘t have it. I’ll go home and watch Antiques Roadshow.

Comedy can’t be about continuous success.

I’ve got an overly developed sense of what selling out is, and I of course worry about it too much.

I didn’t audition for ‘Fargo.’ It was a straight offer.

My job as an actor is for you, so why should my private life be for you, too? That’s not fair.

Actors are people who are doing a job they want to do, which isn’t the case for many of the people who watch what we do.

Are there many Tims in America? I don’t know if I can think of many American Tims.

I know very few people who have literally improvised a film from start to finish.

I’m a big believer that life changes as much as you want it to.

We all know that people who’ve never been on a film set think it’s way more glamorous than the people who work on them.

Television is where the great movies that used to exist have gone.

Disappointment is an endless wellspring of comedy inspiration.

I’ve got a pretty good musical ear, and I can pick things up.

I like uncertainty in roles, and I like uncertainty in art, really.

I love eating. I mean, I really, really love eating.

I like the idea of not everything happening between two human beings to be everyone‘s property.

I think what ‘The Hobbit‘ and Middle-earth deal in are quite universal and timeless themes of honour and love and friendship… so they’re things that do resonate with people.

I’ve been doing interviews for years, and in all that time, I’ve virtually never read one and gone, ‘Yep, factually and tonally that’s exactly what happened.’ Pretty much never.

I did a play once where a reviewer said, ‘Martin Freeman’s too nice to play a bad guy.’ And I thought: ‘Well, bad guys aren’t always bad guys, you know?’ When I see someone play the obvious villain, I know it’s false.

As an actor, you know there are things you get asked to do that you do quite well, with less effort.

To my mind there are not enough things that show the Nazis as human, as smart people, charismatic people, who are not inhuman naturally. But who are able to be fantastically inhuman when they choose to be.

There’s a difference between the parts that I play and who I am and who people think I am. There’s quite a big discrepancy sometimes between those things.

People misunderstand me.

I was on record before I did ‘The Hobbit,’ saying I don’t care at all about 3D. And I suppose I should now say I care a lot about 3D. I’ve always loved 3D, I think everything should be 3D, and I think it’s just a shame ‘The Godfather‘ wasn’t in 3D.

I want to inspire children to be obsessed over jewellery.

My first engagement with any art was music.

Being an actor is just like being any other sort of self-employed person – we’re all just happy to have a job in the first place, but we also thrive off the uncertainty of it.

I enjoy fighting scenes. I like fighting in film. I like pretending to fight in films.

My main priority in any job is when is the soonest I can get back to the three people I love most in the world.

I’ve always slightly envied other actors I know who have different reputations. I think, ‘God, you don’t get people coming up to you, going, ‘Hey!’ – because they’re scared of you.’

There is nothing far-fetched about disappointment as a subject for comedy. It’s something we are all too familiar with.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of things American – but when American people do British stuff, it’s so universally dreadful.

I’ve always loved Christmas and that’s not really gone away from me from being a child to now. It’s always a magical time and I’m unashamed in my love for Christmas.

I’m one of the few people I know who believes in God.

My idea of a good night out is staying in.

I suppose the real cult things now are independent films made for a million pounds.

I work in public.

There are about 20 people in my life that I want to love me, and none of them are the ‘Daily Mail.’

‘The Hobbit’s a big gig. It’s a huge circus that you become a part of.

Most people aren’t these grandstanding heroes.

I’m afraid I don’t have a very pragmatic or unromantic view of props. I don’t imbue them with any great sense of mystery or anything.

This isn’t meant to make me sound interesting and rock ‘n’ roll, but I wouldn’t want to live with me a lot of the time.

I’m geek royalty now.

‘Sherlock’ is one of the biggest things I will do, ever – we could never have predicted that level of insanity around the series.

Humour is – how do I say this without sounding pompous – it’s a huge part of my life.

We can all look on the Internet and go, ‘He hates me! Oh, but she loves me. Oh, but he hates me,’ you know. And that way, madness lies.

When people bully us, we are complicit in it in some way. We do allow it to happen to some extent.

You have to, in a way, just get your head down and do the work and not expect every day to bring riches and not expect every minute to bring wild excitement, ’cause it just doesn’t. It doesn’t on films, anyway.

I love watching Billy Bob, just as a punter anyway. I like his work. But working with him is really easy and really straight-forward. He’s immediately good. He doesn’t have to work up to it. He doesn’t make your life difficult. He listens. He’s a very good listener, in terms of his acting.

I have played nasty people, but not everyone has seen that stuff. Before ‘The Office,’ I mainly got cast as little toe-rags.

I’ve always liked clothes, since I was a kid.

It’s a funny thing, ‘The Office,’ because millions and millions and millions and millions of people didn’t watch it. But culturally, it is more of a phenomenon than almost anything else I can remember as far as British television is concerned.

I am a fan of the Coen brothers. I’m not a fanatic. I’m a big admirer. They create unique worlds, and there is a real atmosphere to their films. Not everyone can get that. That’s a massive part of their appeal: you can recognise them. Like all the great directors or artists, you know it when you see it.

All my life, I’ve felt people are looking at me. So, when I became known, it was like, ‘I’m not imagining this any more. People genuinely are staring at me. Oh, Christ, now they’re coming over!’

Whenever someone says to my mum: ‘How’s your son doing?’ she says: ‘Which one?’ If you’re a parent, you’re not going to go: ‘Oh I’ll concentrate on the famous one.’

I like the quiet life sometimes. I also love a bustling press conference sometimes as well. I love a 600 metre red carpet.

My mum was Labour-voting, but wanted us to know we were important. Basically, everyone’s equal, but you, my children, are a bit better.

It’s always the case, whenever you’re doing someone real, how much you want to do an impression or a characterisation. If I was doing Churchill, or Gandhi – people know exactly how they talked, walked.

I have a very extreme state of mind. Things are very black or very white.

Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy.

I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man, but nothing winds me up more than people saying, ‘Chill out’ to me when I’m irritated!

I wanted to be an actor because I saw ‘Dog Day Afternoon,’ you know what I mean?

I could say, ‘I want to play a French–African humpback,’ but I probably won’t get that role.

I like talky scenes.

I don’t have sentimental attachments to characters at all.

My ambition is to do what I like and to do good things that I might not have done before.

There are lots of things that keep me awake at night, but work isn’t one of them. I mean, no-one‘s going to die if someone doesn’t like what I do. So I don’t feel a great pressure.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

As soon as you get two actors in a room and they’re locking eyes, they’re doing a scene.

I value being able to go into a record shop and people leaving me alone.

I’ve always been attracted to darkness.

You could say I’m a mod, but with a small ‘m’; I don’t wear a parka, but I do question what I wear and what I listen to, which is what it’s all about.

My default state is wariness.

In London we give ourselves a pat on the back, rightly, for not killing one another, for our prejudice being subtle rather than lethal.

I’m not a writer, director or producer.

I like bootcut jeans in a plain style with a nice line.

I hadn’t grown up with ‘The Hobbit;’ I hadn’t grown up with ‘Lord of The Rings,’ anything like that.

It would be a shame for me if I were to become ‘Mr. Half–Hour Sitcom.’

Acting is reacting, and it’s always easier to react when someone is doing a good job.

I look like the man in the moon.

I don’t write anything off without reading a script, and if it’s a good one, I’ll consider it, whether it’s for $20 or a million dollars.

I don’t want to be poor, of course. But I try not to make that the guiding force behind whether I choose to do something or not.

It’s more fun to keep stuff secret.

I buy DVDs. I don’t really buy CDs unless they’re for other people.

I’m very proud of ‘The Office’ – it was one of the best things I’ll ever do. But you do become a slight victim of your own success in the sense that people think that’s you, that’s what you are, and that’s what you’ll play forever.

If I could get bands to come and play in my house, I’d like that.

There was very little drama and performance at my school, so I’ve never forgotten the people who did encourage me and I’ve thought whether it would be a good idea to even get in touch with them and just say thanks, because they really opened a door for me mentally and emotionally – that’s really important.

Please God, I’ll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it’s a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you’ve not been in a war, even if you’ve just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

I always kind of think if The Beatles were still around now, people would’ve lost interest quite a long time ago. Seven years of recording – it’s there forever. I think not outstaying your welcome is a vital ingredient.

Like, honest to God, I don’t expect people to be into what I’m into.

I’m quite a disciplinarian: I can be a shouter. But I can be a very demonstrative kisser and hugger.

Americans assume all British people have at least one servant.

Name anything – high-definition TV, computer obsolescence – and I’m pretty much annoyed by it.

I don’t think it was a surprise that I ended up as an actor, and it was anything but a disappointment.

Even someone as truly dark as Lorne Malvo is still very attractive, and you want to spend time with him because he’s a fun character.

On the surface, you think you wouldn’t have to think at all about being asked to play Bilbo in ‘The Hobbit.’ It’s not prison; it’s a good gig. But you know it’s going to take a long time, and it does. There are times when you thought: ‘Gee, I’ve not seen my house for months.’

I’m not posh or common, I’m in between.

I think acting is all about the other people. Sounds like a worthy thing to say, but it’s true.

I love home. I’d rather be at home than anywhere else.

Your slippers last a lot longer in your bedroom. On a film set, they do get very scuffed up.

I can’t actually believe how good ‘The Sopranos‘ is. I genuinely am dumbfounded by it. It’s like when you realize how good The Beatles are, and you think, ‘How did they do that?’